Diaspora has made news in the internet community with the release of their open-source software code for their Facebook clone. The news of the release has had mixed reviews in the development community. The whole idea of Diaspora is to give back the user control over the data that is contained within their profile. Diaspora works much like torrents do, a host "seed" is what contains the profile information, not one centralized server array like with Facebook. If you couldn't host your own seed, you could choose whom to entrust your information to, a tip-of-the-hat to more privacy concerned users.
Some developers have expressed concern over some of the choices in terms of the languages and databases Diaspora was developed in, but its still early in Diaspora's life. Hopefully the creators of Diaspora will figure out all the bugs and get this system up and running because in my mind the future of social-networking is user control.